


How Much Was Mine To Keep

by tearupthesky



Category: Bachelorette (2012), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Genre: Abortion, Crossover, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tearupthesky/pseuds/tearupthesky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If at first you don't succeed, find a time machine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Much Was Mine To Keep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [irishmizzy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishmizzy/gifts).



If it hadn't been for that voicemail, Clyde wouldn't have given the ad a second thought.

He travels to the west coast for work two or three times a year, and Gena calls about half as often, rarely more than a week apart from his flight. Either she stalks him online as regularly as he does her, or it's just the kind of low-grade telepathy they've shared since she was eleven and he was fourteen, when he used to pick up the phone to call her and she'd already be there on the other end of the line before the first ring even started. His mom used to say they were separated at birth, which made him feel better at the time about having the hots for a sixth grader, even though, looking back, he's pretty sure it was supposed to have the opposite effect.

He's thumbing through an old paper while he waits for his coffee when he sees the ad, sandwiched between shitty used cars for sale and unwanted pets.

_WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke._

It's distracting enough that he misses his name being called and his coffee's lukewarm by the time he gets it. The only mystery is whether someone's shooting a documentary or writing a book, but either way it seems like a dick move in the name of art, even to a guy who lives in Brooklyn.

He snaps a picture of the ad and thinks about posting it to Facebook, thinks about tagging Gena. It feels like the first draft of a suicide note. He puts away his phone.

Two days later he rents a car. Ocean View's less than three hours from Seattle. Maybe the beach air will clear his head. Maybe that's why he can't stop thinking about it.

***

The newspaper refuses to give out any information, but a hundred bucks at the post office gets him an address and a heads-up that this guy, Kenneth, is some kind of survivalist gun nut out in the woods. Clyde knows that's his final cue to turn around and not be the blond chick in the horror movie who goes outside in her underwear to investigate strange noises. Still, he's come this far, and the ad keeps rankling him, like a scratch on the roof of his mouth that he can't ignore. 

The house looks like it's definitely full of inbred murderers, and the porch steps creak appropriately under his feet. If his body is ever found, he hopes Gena hears about it. He hopes she wishes she had cut him just a little bit more slack when she had the chance.

The girl who answers the door has the blankest eyes Clyde has ever seen, and for the first moment in this whole endeavor, he's genuinely kind of scared.

"I'm here about the ad," he says.

She stares a second longer, then says, "The position has been filled."

The doors starts to close, and without considering any consequences, Clyde puts out a hand to stop it. Suddenly the girl is holding a knife, its appearance so abrupt that Clyde is pretty sure it dropped out of her sleeve into her hand. He's so impressed it slips his mind to run away.

"You're trespassing on private property," the girl says.

"I want to talk to Kenneth," Clyde says, and he sees her fingers twitch against the handle of the knife.

"Who do you work for?" she asks.

He starts to reach for a business card, but her fingers flex again, so he keeps his hands where she can see them. "I'm a project manager at AOL," he says.

She blinks. "Seriously? Are you sure you didn't go back in time already?"

Hearing the words out loud makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "So you're serious about this?" he says, lowering his voice as if there's a sane person nearby to overhear. "You believe in this time travel thing?"

She looks at him for a minute like she can see straight through him, see exactly how full of crap he is. "Why are you here," she says, toneless, "if you don't?"

Clyde's never said it out loud before. Maybe this trip will have some therapeutic value after all. He looks her in the eye and says, "I kind of ruined someone's life."

"This isn't a charter tour," she says. "Have you tried, I don't know, apologizing?"

At this point time travel seems like the more viable option. "She was my best friend," Clyde says, "and I fucked things up beyond repair. I just want to take it back. I just thought -- I thought maybe the guy who wrote that ad would understand how much I wish I could take it back."

The girl stares hard at him for another minute, then holds up the knife until the tip is only a few inches away from his throat. He swallows.

"If you fuck with him, I'll kill you," she says.

If some delusional backwoods mad scientist can get a girl to love him this much, maybe he really does have all the answers.

***

The scary girl's name is Darius, and she says, "No."

"Let's hear him out," says Kenneth, who's way more rational than Clyde was expecting, eighties headband notwithstanding. "You said his intentions seemed pure. I trust your judgment."

Darius screws up her face. "Well, trust it now. We're not going back in time so he can stop his girlfriend from getting an abortion, that's creepy. It was her choice, he doesn't get to go back and change that."

"That's not what I want," Clyde says, finding himself leaning into this earnest discussion of time travel with surprising exuberance. Maybe these weirdos put something in his tea. "I mean, yeah, I wanted her to have the baby, I loved her and I wanted to marry her, but she didn't know that because I never told her. Maybe if all the information had been on the table, things would have worked out differently."

Darius doesn't look convinced. "Yeah, I'm sure it would have worked out great, having babies at sixteen is totally the thing that improves most people's lives."

"We were in love," Clyde says. "We were happy. I know she's been as miserable as I've been ever since it happened."

"What's your evidence?" Kenneth asks. 

Clyde had the voicemail memorized after half a dozen plays, but that hasn't stopped him from listening, or made it any easier to hear. He taps his phone and braces himself.

"Oh, hey, Clyde," Gena says on the message. "I hope everything's still going super swell. I'm just calling because I thought you'd want to know that I totally had another guy's abortion last week. You know, just in case you thought you were special or something. A couple more and I think I get a free one, so I'm looking forward to that. Oh, and guess what? This time the guy actually showed up to drive me to the fucking appointment. I felt just like Cinderella. So thanks again for fucking me over, you fucking selfish dick."

Gena's sniffling hard through the call, and it's impossible to tell if she's crying or coked up or both. Either way, it's not the voice of a person who's happy with the direction their life has taken.

Kenneth and Darius look at each other, clearly employing their own brand of telepathy, then Kenneth stands, looking expectant until Clyde does the same.

"We'll take your mission into consideration," Kenneth says somberly. "Don't leave town."

Clyde knows they probably just haven't decided on the best way to kill and eat him yet, but he rents a hotel room by the ocean anyway. He drove all the way here. He might as well get something out of it.

***

Two days later Clyde's phone rings and Kenneth, without a greeting, recites a list of items for him to purchase. He's instructed to buy each item at a separate store, and pay cash. It's not an unenjoyable way to spend an afternoon. He feels like a spy, or like one of those guys who's forced to rob a bank because the real bank robbers kidnapped his child, like he can't be held accountable for the weirdness of his actions.

Once he's done and on his way back to the hotel, a yellow Datsun cuts him off in no traffic whatsoever. From the passenger seat, Darius waves for him to follow, and he wonders how long they've been doing the same.

They turn onto what's less a road and more a path into the woods, driving deep enough that no one's going to hear Clyde getting murdered. Kenneth and Darius climb out of the Datsun and Clyde follows them a short distance into the trees, his mom's voice nagging in his head with every step. Whatever happens to him, she'd probably feel worse if he killed himself, and it doesn't feel like there's much else waiting for him back in his regular life.

"Your mission is a go," Kenneth says, when they've reached whatever magical spot where the CIA and aliens can't hear him.

Well, at this point it better be. Clyde doesn't have another use for military grade binoculars.

"What made you decide to do it?" he asks later, after some of the strategic details have been ironed out.

Kenneth and Darius glance at each other, then he says, "We think it will be intellectually valuable to undertake a mission where we’re both totally objective observers, with no personal stake in the outcome."

"Yeah, but," Clyde says. "I mean, you’re on my side, right?"

He puts on his winningest smile, but they both just stare at him until it melts away.

***

So, apparently, time travel is real.

Clyde pukes somewhere in the middle, probably around 2004.

When the world snaps back into place, the boat is sitting on the little lake where he and Gena got caught skinny dipping after his sixteenth birthday party, and where he taught her how to fish when she was twelve. Even if he had never been there before, the air and the trees are so uniquely _home_ that there could be no mistaking it. There’s nothing nearby to indicate the time, but after traveling almost three thousand miles in the span of a couple blinks, all of Clyde’s skepticism seems to have been vomited out.

Muscle memory takes over and Clyde helps Kenneth and Darius secure and camouflage the boat, just like he practiced in the drills.

"So it’s not just a time machine," he says, starting to catch his breath, yanking a knot into place. "It’s more like a TARDIS."

"So you're not just a geek," says Darius, "you're more like a nerd."

That doesn't sound objective to Clyde.

***

Since this whole thing was supposed to be impossible in the first place, Clyde didn't really put a lot of thought into what he was going to say to his eighteen-year-old self. 

Once the time travel is out the way, Clyde assumes the hard part is over and the explanation will mostly take care of itself. Of course his younger self will recognize him and realize what must have happened. However difficult it is to comprehend, he won't be able to ignore the evidence staring him in the face.

Unfortunately, at eighteen, Clyde seems to have been an oblivious dick.

"Come on!" Clyde says, throwing up his arms, almost spanning the width of the alley behind the Radio Shack where he worked in high school. "We look exactly alike!"

"Um, yeah," teenage Clyde says. "Maybe if I were, like, forty."

He says it like it's the oldest age he can even think of, and Clyde wonders if it would somehow hurt his own face if he decked this kid. He's still pretty fuzzy on the rules of what's happening here.

When Clyde brings up Gena, understanding clicks in his teenage self's eyes, and Clyde feels hopeful for a second, before the kid says, "She put you up to this, didn't she? That's how you know all this stuff about me. She told you."

Clyde's never told anyone else about this before. Well, he guesses he still hasn't. "Does Gena know about the names you have picked out? Henry for a boy and Emma for a girl?"

Teenage Clyde shuts his mouth. That's a start, at least.

***

Clyde bums an American Spirit off his younger self, coughing since it's been about twelve years, and he tells himself everything, about their shitty job, their pathetic life, how they'll never feel the same about any other girl as they feel about Gena, how every single thing goes downhill after she has the abortion.

"But I already told her I'd do whatever she wanted," young dumb Clyde says.

"You didn't tell you want to marry her." 

"I've been telling her that since she was thirteen!"

It does actually sound kind of creepy now that Clyde hears it out loud.

"It's different now," Clyde says. "You guys were kids then and you're not anymore, not after this. It's not going to blow over. She's going to be sad and fucked up and she's going to hate you, and you're going to think it'll blow over, but it won't. If you let her go now, that's it. She's just going to be gone."

The kid ends up taking off out of the alley at a run. Clyde's never inspired anyone with a rousing speech before. Maybe he'll make an all right dad after all.

***

Clyde wants to stick around in the past long enough to see how things turn out, at least to confirm that the abortion isn't going to happen, but Kenneth and Darius insist that it would be counterproductive. When the mission is complete, you go home. Clyde doesn't see the harm, but whatever, they're his ride, so he doesn't have much of a choice.

One of the other rules was that Clyde couldn't take any identifying information into the past, so his wallet and keys are waiting for him in a safe at Kenneth's house when they get back. Somebody's are, anyway. There's a completely different address on his license, his business cards are gone, and -- oh, God.

Tucked past the credit cards, receipts, and junk, there's a tiny photo of a baby girl in a white christening dress, with a ribbon tied around her headful of soft-looking brown curls. She has Gena's creamy skin and hazel eyes, and his funny ears and crooked mouth, and it hurts him inside, like a legitimate medical emergency, that he's not in the same room as this little girl right now.

Kenneth gives him a reliable number before he leaves, requesting a report on the effects of the mission. Clyde can't go more than five minutes on the way without looking back at the photo to make sure it hasn't disappeared. He calls the home number listed on his cell, and there's no answer but the machine informs him that he's reached Clyde and Gena.

It worked. It actually worked.

***

It's the kind of small weathered house that would have depressed him before the trip, but now he can't wait to get inside, bounding up the front steps two at a time. When he finds the key that fits the lock, it makes everything feel real, and he can't remember feeling happier for a single moment in his life, not when he was a little kid, not the first time Gena told him she loved him, never. This is how life is supposed to be, Clyde thinks. This is how a person is supposed to feel.

"Gen! Genny!" He shouts so loud that part of him expects to hear a baby start crying in response, even though his daughter would be over ten by now.

There's no answer. He goes upstairs to check and finds his bedroom, the closet half empty, no clothes except his, all shoved to one side. There's a photo on the dresser, he and Gena on the courthouse steps. She's wearing white and holding flowers, her belly huge and round, his hand resting on it lightly. Neither of them are smiling.

There's another bedroom down the hall, everything pink and ruffled and delicate. There's a dollhouse and a tea set and a bunch of other things that wouldn't interest a girl older than five or six. When Clyde reaches down and touches the little pink table, his fingertips come away dusty.

He goes back downstairs, feeling shell-shocked, his stomach hurting. They could be anywhere, How's he going to find them? How did teenage Clyde fuck up this second chance so badly? Ungrateful little prick.

The light on the answering machine is blinking, and when he presses the button, he hears Gena say, her voice dark and exhausted, "Just sign the goddamn papers, Clyde. And change that fucking message."

He finds the divorce papers on top of a desk, marked with pieces of tape ordering him to _sign here, sign here_. He tosses them aside and starts rifling through the old papers and bills, looking for some clue to where Gena and his daughter might be. He can still make things right. Whatever he did, he'll make it up to her, to both of them.

Instead he finds the hospital bills, the sympathy cards, and the funeral home contract.

***

Clyde doesn't know what else to do, so he calls his mom. When she picks up the phone, alive and right where she's supposed to be, he has to take a few deep unsteady breaths before he can bring himself to say anything.

"Oh, Clyde," she says sadly, sounding unsurprised.

"Mom," he says, his voice cracking like a little kid, still somehow sounding older than he's ever felt before. "What happened?"

"You know what happened," she says. Yeah, that's what he was afraid of. "Most marriages can't survive what you went through. And on top of that, you were both so young. Sweetie, you were just so young."

"But we were in love," Clyde insists. "I mean, we were happy, right? Before -- before, the three of us, we were happy." There has to be some way to fix it. He can go back again, change it somehow. There has to be some way to get it right.

His mom sighs. "Emma was always so sick," she says. "She was in so much pain. I know you and Gena both did the best you could."

"At least we were together," Clyde says, a hint of a whine creeping into his voice, like the mamma's boy he's always been. "Why couldn't we get through it together?"

"Clyde," his mom says, starting to sound tired.

"Please just tell me what I did," Clyde says, his face suddenly wet. "Just tell me and I'll fix it. I'll figure something out. I'll do better. Just tell me."

Finally his mom says, "I know it was hard for you. You weren't ready for anything that hard, and that's my fault. After your dad left, I wanted to protect you, and I spoiled you instead. You don't always get to be the saddest, Clyde. Things aren't always hardest for you. I know how many nights Gena spent alone in that hospital room. I know how many nights she spent holding Emma's hand when you weren't there. She was sad, too. It was hard for her, too."

Maybe his mom keeps talking, but Clyde's already running out the front door. He'll thank her later.

***

"No," says Kenneth, this time. "We can't repeat a mission indefinitely until it yields ideal results."

"I'm not asking for indefinitely," Clyde says. "Just one more time, please. I was wrong about the mission. I was wrong about everything."

"That's unfortunate," Kenneth says, "but there's no way to guarantee that a second trip won't make things even worse."

"Our kid lived a short painful life and then died," Clyde says. "What could possibly be worse than that?"

Kenneth opens his mouth, looking ready to offer examples, but Darius elbows him in the ribs and he closes it again.

"Please," Clyde says again. "Look, I thought I was supposed to change her mind. I thought we were supposed to stay together and be happy and secretly I'd get to say I told you so for the rest of our lives, but it's not going to happen like that. I think I'm just supposed to try to make things easier for her. Just, less terrible, maybe, that's all. Please let me try one more time."

Kenneth and Darius exclude Clyde from another silent conversation, then she says, "One more time. If you don't like how things turn out, maybe consider springing for therapy or something."

When all of this is over, Clyde's pretty sure that's going to be in the cards either way.

***

He doesn't waste any time trying to make friends with his younger self.

"Listen, you little shit," he says, grabbing teenage Clyde by the collar of his untucked polo shirt and shoving him against the wall of the alley. "You're going to go to that appointment with Gena. You're going to drive her there and hold her hand and do whatever else she needs you to do, and you're going to do it for three reasons. One, because you love her and you want her to be okay. Two, because when you fuck a fifteen-year-old girl without a condom, that's the bare minimum of responsibility you have signed yourself up for. And three, because if you find some new and unexpected way to fuck this up, the next birth I go back in time to prevent will be yours, and that will probably cause the universe to implode or something, and all the mix tapes in the world aren't going to put it back together again." 

He lets go of the kid and takes a step back, then moves forward again and points a finger in his face.

"Speaking of mix tapes, don't make her one with that Ben Folds song about how she's a brick and you're drowning slowly. That's a shitty thing to say to someone."

***

This time when he gets back, it's like he never left in the first place. He has the same address, same job, same numbers stored in his phone. The only difference, as far as he can tell, is that Gena's has a 212 area code.

She picks up on the second ring, and she sounds happy to hear from him for the first time in over a decade.

"Hey, Clyde," she says. Her voice is clear and healthy. "God, how are you? It's been like a million years."

Clyde swallows. "Yeah, a while, right? I'm good. How are you, Genny?"

She lets the nickname slide without skipping a beat. "Kind of great, actually. Still writing for the magazine. You're still at AOL, right? Why do we both have jobs that sound like they haven't existed since, like, 1998? Did you ever think that maybe we died in a plane crash or something and we just haven't realized it yet?"

He has no idea what happened, why they broke up, if she's seeing someone else, but right now it doesn't matter. She sounds happy. That's enough.

"You want to get coffee, Gen?" he asks, interrupting a monologue about how the _Lost_ writers got too far up their own asses. 

"Uh, sure," she says slowly. He can hear the corners of her mouth twisting up at the end. "When were you thinking?"

"Now," he says, smiling back. "Does now work?"

She's quiet for a minute and Clyde can almost hear her braiding a section of her hair, the way she always does when she's thinking. "Can you wait until tomorrow, or is this a one-night-only ex-girlfriend booty call type of situation?"

"I can wait," Clyde says. "This is more like a my life sucks without you, and I'm sorry, and I miss my best friend type of situation. So, you know, no rush."

"Oh," Gena says. "Well, in that case. I'll see you in like half an hour?"

She names the place and Clyde writes down the address carefully, repeating it back to her just in case.

"I'll be there, Genny," he says. "I promise, I'm on my way."

"I'm not worried," Gena says softly, like when they used to whisper into the phone in the middle of the night so their parents wouldn't hear. "I could always count on you."


End file.
